Turning 30

I spent my twenties in love. I hope to spend every decade of my life in love, but if there was a highlight to my twenties—if someone asked me, “Hey, what did you do with that decade?” the answer would be, “I chased love and I caught it and I ate it and now it’s all mine”.

I am not an accomplished person by any conventional means. And I’m not sorry about that, not even a little. Even when I was a kid, my only aspirations were to fall in love and write books.

I dabbled in a community college and managed to come out a florist. Who does that? I moved to Sweden, because that’s where my love lived and, well, Sweden is awesome. Okay, it wasn’t awesome at first because being a foreigner is hard. I started going to the gym and trying new food for the first time in my life. I went vegetarian. I learned Swedish. I traveled. I got dual citizenship. I moved to the Arctic Circle. And I got married.

That was my twenties. Not bad, right? I mean, I don’t have a degree in anything or a career, but shit, I love my life. That’s the point, isn’t it? So, I’m not worried about my thirties. Or about being thirty. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel…uncomfortable. I have a lot of books I want to write, want to publish and see out in the world, so in that arena of my life I feel like I’m behind. It’s hard not to acknowledge time passed when you hit a decade marker.

But in four days my first novel, Vanity in Dust, is going to be published.